Music and people hold my life together. I describe experiences, discoveries and insights, often connected with music and with teaching and playing piano. The blog is a way to stay in touch with friends, and may also be food for thought for anyone else, especially people connected with music and the piano/
Musik und Menschen halten mein Leben zusammen. Ich beschreibe Erfahrungen, Entdeckungen und Einsichten, oft in Zusammenhang mit dem Klavierspiel und dem Klavierunterricht.

Monday, March 3, 2014

I have been working on a memoir for quite a while already. It describes the influences that inspired my love for music and the piano, and their impact on my life.

I had a very hard time during my first semesters in music college. I studied school music, with piano as my major instrument. I played it better than the violin, and I couldn’t see myself as a singer. I didn’t particularly like the piano, and if anyone had told me that I would eventually leave the institution with a degree in piano pedagogy, I would probably have called them insane. If it hadn’t been for Mozart’s Piano Sonata K 333, that my professor assigned me one day, I might have dropped out altogether.

Remembering the incident made me curious to return to the piece I hadn’t touched in more than thirty years. In the course of practicing, memories came back, how the beauty of the music touched me, and how my left hand used to go into spasms over the accompaniment in the development section of the first movement. That wasn’t the only technical issue I was unable to resolve back then. It’s amazing what has become possible in the course of seventeen years of studying with Seymour Bernstein.

I casually mentioned to him at a lesson that I might record the piece and put it on youtube before turning to other repertoire, and he spontaneously offered his instrument, his studio, his time and his skills as a recording engineer to produce the recording. When I record at home, I have to struggle with hissing radiators and two cats, who are musically inclined. Even if I manage to work my way around those obstacles, a jet approaching Newark Airport may thunder over the house at an inappropriate moment and make itself heard. So, I gladly, accepted Seymour’s generous offer, not anticipating what I got myself into.

Playing Mozart is the most delicate task a pianist can take on. There is a fragility to its thin texture that turns every unevenness in shaping, misplaced accents, lack of balance between melody and accompaniment into major mistakes. In addition to that, it’s supposed to sound musically expressive. ”Children love Mozart’s music because of the quantity of the notes, adults dread it because of the quality of the notes,” my late colleague and fellow student with Seymour, Richard Shirk used to say.

I had exactly three days to prepare for the first recording session. I excused myself from a friend’s concert I had planned to attend, and from a wedding party I was invited to, which gave me another day to practice.

In spite of that, the session was grueling. The small recording device that fits in the palm of a hand exerted more pressure than a live audience. Mistakes in live concerts happen and pass. Mistakes in recordings last forever and tend to multiply with every take. In addition to that, I had someone sitting next to me who hears the flees cough and the grass grow, as we say in German.

“The right hand was good this time, but there was a note in the bass that didn’t speak.”

“Seymour, are you sure? I didn’t notice that.” Did it really matter, I secretly asked myself. I quickly suppressed the impulse to say it out loud and slightly annoyed.

“Just play it again, you can do it.” The next time through, the bass was probably perfect, but something else went wrong. I’ve never been so grateful for the ring of the doorbell that announced the arrival of the next student.

While I packed up to leave, Seymour cheerfully revived memories: “When I did recording sessions like that with Richard, he would always break down at some point, and start to cry.”

Hearing Seymour say that made me feel better. At least I wasn't alone with my feelings. Although I didn’t cry, there certainly were moments when I felt like it.

He continued: “Then, Richard had to lie down on the couch for a moment, and I’d give him a swig of cognac. After that, we would continue to record.”

“Did you supply the cognac, or do you have to bring your own?” I asked, thinking of the next recording session. I don’t particularly care for alcoholic beverages, but extraordinary tasks sometimes require extraordinary measures. Or maybe M&Ms would do the trick? Finishing the first movement was an enormous effort, and we had two to go.

Ultimately, I did it without either alcohol or chocolate. In the two weeks until the next session, I spent hours at the piano, with the music on the music stand, controlling each phrase by recording it. It was the only way to make sure I was really playing what Mozart wrote in the score, and what I heard in my mind.

It took us exactly twenty minutes to record both movements. Listening to the finished recording, I am very grateful to Seymour for pushing me to the limits, and slightly beyond, when I would have probably decided: let it go, enough already.

I won’t tell what he did with the turns in M 150 of the first movement. All I’m going to say is that I have to practice them for some time to come, to make sure they’re concert proof, if I play the sonata in recital.

Richard Shirk, my colleague and fellow student with Seymour, was an extraordinary pianist, and one of the most sensitive and musical performers of Mozart’s music I know. On youtube, I found a recording of his performance of the first movement of Mozart’s Sonata in c-minor K 475, which David Dubal presented in his radio show. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jbzuuW4mnw

Richard was also a kind, supportive and knowledgeable teacher. I took a lesson with him one year, when I prepared a Mozart piano concerto for a concerto competition at the Piano Texas Seminar and Festival. Seymour was already away for the summer, and I remember with gratitude how Richard boosted my confidence and inspired the final touch of my interpretation with his insightful comments. At the master classes Seymour held at his studio, Richard always heard the good intention in a less than convincing performance, and contributed good ideas how to bring it out.

The first time I met Richard was during my sabbatical in New York in the winter of 1999/2000, when I took a leave from teaching in Germany so I could take a weekly lesson with Seymour. Richard and I had been at a concert together with our teacher and a couple of other students. The two of us shared the last part of the ride home in a cab. We talked about studying with Seymour, and Richard said: “He changed my life.” That was something we had in common.

In 2008, Richard died tragically from complications after surgery. As it happens, we recorded the second and third movement on the anniversary of his passing, and I would like to dedicate the recording of Mozart’s piano sonata in B-flat major K 333 to his memory.